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Making Connections: Wimbledon, Media and Society • 187

sport and commercialization, sport and social identities, sport and embodiment. All
these concerns are part of the mediation of Wimbledon. The historical and cultural
values of tennis have become part of the Wimbledon brand, broadcast around the
world. ‘Queuing Procedures and Code of Conduct’ are available on the offi cial Wim-
bledon Web site for actual or virtual participation in the event. Despite appearances,
Wimbledon is a highly successful commercial enterprise. The lack of sponsorship
around the courts at Wimbledon masks the effectiveness of its strategy of marketing

the Wimbledon brand. The politics of social identity are firmly part of that brand:
Wimbledon has been branded as a reconstruction of upper-middle-class English
identity, with antiquated gender codes and a ‘predominantly white’ ethnic mix. The
bodies, therefore, that are celebrated at Wimbledon are those that best fit the mould.

The grunts of contemporary, aggressive sportswomen are frowned upon.
Nevertheless, the success of the brand and its global mediation through news-
papers, magazines, television, films, the Internet, the Museum and the branded

space of Wimbledon itself suggests that things are not quite as they seem. Far from
exclusive, Wimbledon is available to anybody with a television or access to a news-
paper, the Internet or a mobile phone. The contemporary players are not Victorian
ladies and gentlemen, even if some of them are constructed as such by the media.
Resistance to the anglicized, upper-middle-class behaviour code shown in John
McEnroe’s outbursts in the 1980s has been incorporated into the brand, as McEnroe
has become one of the stalwarts of Wimbledon commentary in both the United
States and the United Kingdom. New meanings are being generated in the media

flows enabled by globalization, and Wimbledon’s legacy of exclusivity predicated
on the basis of nation, class, gender and race is destabilized through this process.
The bodies of players like the Williams sisters, which populate the globalised media
representations of Wimbledon, are ‘other’ to the white, male, upper- and middle-
class English bodies who have traditionally held power at Wimbledon. Wimble-
don demonstrates the interconnections between the varied elements that constitute
mediated sport in contemporary society as well as illustrating the interconnections
between media analysis and sociocultural issues and themes.
This book has demonstrated approaches to analyse the complex and fast-moving

flows of mediated sport. Each chapter has focused on specific cases that show how

to conduct an analysis of sport in film, on television, in newspapers, in magazines, in
museums and stadia and on the Internet. Our aim has been to provide a toolkit with
which it is possible to unpack the layers of meaning in mediated sport as it happens.
We hope that readers will be inspired to apply these tools to make sense of their own
experience of sport in the media. We conclude the book by asking readers to refl ect
on their own interaction with the sport media, transforming their consumption of
mediated sport into the critical analysis of sport, media and society.